During recent meetings with students and members of Global Leadership and Career Development of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Leadership, we spoke about leadership and mental performance coaching activities. When I explained that, following my work assignment with the university, I would join a national sports selection in preparation for an international tournament, our conversation pivoted to identifying similarities in the approach of successful leaders of high-performing sports and corporate teams. In our discussion, we aimed to find parallels between successful TEAM management in sports and business. I write TEAM in capital letters as we were not interested in analyzing the INDIVIDUAL virtues of successful persons in the sports and corporate world, such as resilience, determination, resolve, pressure resistance, motivation, values, and vision.

Leadership is, without doubt, one of the most dynamic and attention-grabbing concepts whenever trying to explain the success or mistakes of a given team or organization. A leader's influence on a team's performance and the impact on each team member are objects of continuous studies across various academic fields. The central concept that defines a leader's actions is influence: leadership is decisively influential. Therefore, we can define a team leader as a person who can influence a group's thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. A leader continuously uses his powers to influence the team with decisions, actions, and reactions. One could say that everything the leader does influences the team's result.

In this blog, I share five concepts from our discussions.

The first concept is that leadership is an ongoing process. It is not an isolated and detached action that one person performs on the rest of the team. On the contrary, it demands that the leader has an active presence and is committed to investing his time and energy, especially when starting to lead a team.

The second concept is to respect the individual differences of each team member. For the leader's influence to be positive, it must be perceived as a process that includes and respects individual differences. Learning the team members' unique particularities demands a lot of emotional work. The emphasis is on managing people with awareness of their individual motivating needs and offering equal space and opportunities to everyone. It requires the leader to deal with specific sympathies and animosities from the outset and foster equal treatment for the whole group.

Avoiding preferences and offering the same attention and dedication to all team members probably constitute some of the most complex tasks for those who aspire to lead high-performing teams.

The third concept follows from the first two concepts and relates to expanding on the member's skills and talents. This point relates to the core of the leadership process itself.

Many leaders are only outcome-focused, neglecting the skills and abilities of each team member. Thus, many team members struggle under the burden of trying to perform an assigned task for which they are ill-equipped. I believe instead that a leader should focus on the process that expands on the team's skills and talents (performance). He should put the right people on the right job. Only in this way can he influence and create effective and lasting leadership. Simply said, a well-aligned team with more competencies will increase the probability of good execution and sustainable success.

The difference between performance and outcome can maybe best be explained through the eyes of the world of sports.  These two words are engraved in the vocabulary of the whole sports community. The outcome is the interaction between what the team or the athlete does and their environment. While performance is the level of execution of each of the efforts that the athlete performs. The raw material for the coach’s development as a leader is performance, constantly boosting each athlete's execution level to improve continuously.

A fourth concept is that the leader needs to offer the team direction. She should not only define the short, medium, or long-term outcome objectives but also provide strategies that allow the team to reach the proposed goals. The leader should develop a strategic philosophy and, from there, devise a vision of success that will enable her to define an action plan for each team member. She should also provide for possible scenario changes and unexpected actions affecting the team's performance.

The fifth concept associated with maximizing influence is perhaps the most complicated for leaders: creating an enjoyable working environment. Enjoyment is a positive emotional state that tends to accompany the high performance. Emotions determine the energy available to an individual or a team, whether it is positive or negative, and whether it is easy or difficult to renew. Emotions are the color that brings movies to life. However, all too often, a leader has his team watching in black and white instead of shots full of color. The leader's influence has thus a considerable effect on the team's energy levels. A leader must know how to ease tensions, defuse undesirable behavior, and reorient individual and collective activities. Doing so has a crucial influence on the team atmosphere and performance. To achieve this, the leader must adequately combine all elements related to workload, pressure, stress, failure, the sense of achievement, interpersonal relationships, and after-work activities.

Enjoyment within the team creates sustainability and staying power. It gives the members the energy to continue performing their tasks with long-lasting dedication and willingness.

In short, successful high-performance corporate and sports leaders:

·     Understand leadership as a process.

·     Respect individual differences within the team.

·     Expand on the team's assets.

·     Continually direct the team.

·     Generate an enjoyable working environment.

In this blog, the word "influence" was used deliberately. Persuading the team is one of the most significant challenges a leader faces. A leader should understand that it is necessary to convince rather than impose. Managing by imposition is no longer considered to be an efficient leadership method. The team must be convinced of the direction to take, the destination to reach, and the individual contribution necessary to meet the collective challenge.

Before signing off, I like to clarify that, obviously, the desired outcome for any team leader is to win the match or to achieve the KPIs[1], sales, earnings, etc. A leader is constantly making decisions and working towards this outcome. Performance and enjoyment are two main attributes for a leader to achieve a result. Therefore, the leader's focus must be on the process of developing and reinforcing these attributes to create an environment for sustainable team success.

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[1] KPI: Key Performance Indicator

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